


Run Aground

by verdant_fire



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Classical Music, Denial, Ficlet, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Music, Post-Reichenbach, Sherlock Plays the Violin, Sherlock's Violin, Violinist Sherlock, Violins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 10:46:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdant_fire/pseuds/verdant_fire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock left his music.  John can still hear the notes coalescing, slow and elegiac and oddly fierce, like a Viking ship going down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run Aground

Sherlock left his music. It’s still there on the stand, his latest— _last_ —composition, scrawled messily in his sprawling, manic hand. John can still hear the notes coalescing, slow and elegiac and oddly fierce, like a Viking ship going down.

Sleep is a minefield that John avoids, studded with memories of blood on pavement and hitched breaths into mobile phones. Staring at the ceiling isn’t much better, so John goes downstairs and turns Sherlock’s stereo on. Sherlock is not dead; Sherlock could come back at any moment and raise an eyebrow at John’s being in his room, listening to violin music. The piece upshifts into something quick and feverish—Vivaldi, John thinks—and if he closes his eyes, he can see Sherlock playing it. He’s standing in front of the window, his back to John, and the setting sun lights him up like a funeral pyre. His bow flies over the strings, fluid strokes that make the instrument sing, and his whole body surrenders to the music, consumptive and shaking—his inchoate curls and his incendiary white phosphorus heart.

It’s so beautiful that John could cry. He doesn’t.

Sherlock left his music, and he could come back at any moment. So John lies down on the floor, and waits, and drowns in the sound.

John waits for a very long time.

**Author's Note:**

> In my head, John was listening to [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=watQ28Fx2Mg), the Presto from the 3rd Movement of 'Summer' from Vivaldi's _The Four Seasons_.


End file.
